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American Prestige

Bonus - Politics Without Power w/ Anton Jäger (Preview)

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

News, History, Politics

4.81.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

⁠Subscribe now⁠ for the full episode. Danny welcomes back to the show historian ⁠Anton Jäger⁠ to talk about the decline of mass politics and the rise of hyperpolitics across Europe and the United States. They explore the collapse of parties and unions, the neoliberal turn of the 70s and 80s, the 2008 financial crisis and the decade of protest that followed, social media and political expression, the far right’s ascendance and liberalism’s failure, why Trumpism lacks sustainable organization, the Democrats’ inability to build a governing coalition, and whether new political institutions can come out of the current chaos. Grab your copy of Anton’s book ⁠Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to American Prestige. To listen ad-free, you can subscribe at Americanprostagepod.com. Find the link in our show notes.

0:11.8

How do you explain the rise of the far, right? I mean, I have my own explanations, which people listening to this podcast have heard, which to basically put it in the most

0:22.4

parsimonious to use that word again is basically it's a failure of liberalism, creating an opening,

0:27.9

more than anything else, in my opinion, people could disagree. But how do you explain the rise

0:33.7

of the far right when this is supposedly a decade of the end of mass politics and

0:37.5

hyper-politics? What about the proud boys, Anton, what about January 6th? What do you say to that?

0:43.1

Well, I mean, it's very easy to draw causal line from 2008 to 2016 and Trump's first election victory.

0:51.3

I think many people have told this story, including, for example, Adam 2,

0:54.4

so there's no need to recapitulate it here. But it is indeed absolutely essential that we see

0:58.9

the rise of the far right, both in Europe and the US, as part of the same repoliticization story

1:04.9

and mainly a function of the crisis of liberalism or the incapacity for the liberalism

1:10.5

that seems very

1:11.1

hydromonic in the 90s and 2000s to basically keep on buying popular consent.

1:15.5

There was a certain political economy, there was a certain political culture, there was a certain

1:19.0

public sphere which stabilizes that liberalism and in 2010s it just completely comes apart.

1:24.6

That doesn't mean obviously that liberalism as an institutional force disappears, but its capacity to be had Germanic in a very, very basic, Grammshund sense,

1:32.9

obviously weakens critically and has particularly been the far right that's benefited of this crisis.

1:39.3

It's not, let's say, the pre-revolutionary threat from the left that spawns the right in the 2010s,

1:45.0

it's very much the failure of liberalism to keep its old coalitions together that explains

1:49.6

why there's now all kinds of political opportunity on the right.

1:52.4

And what Anton is referencing there is a fascism analogy, just to underline.

1:56.7

Yes, that is what he is referencing.

...

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